The Photobooth

This photobooth is in Spitalfields Market in East London, and it is manufacture by Snapparazzi, established 2009.

If you saw the film Amélie you will know that the plot involves the heroine’s pursuit of a young man who collects photographs of strangers who have discarded their unwanted photos from passport photo booths.

Probably everyone above a certain age remembers getting a passport photo from a booth.

There’s an exhibition on photobooths coming up at The Photographer’s Gallery to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its invention. The exhibition runs from 10 October 2025 to 22 February 2026.

I haven’t seen the exhibition but I wondered where the first booth was located and who developed it.

I hadn’t given it much thought before and I imagined it was developed by a big company like Kodak. But no, it was invented by Anatol Marco Josepho, born Anatolу Markovich Yozefovich in Russia in 1894.

He worked in Germany and China before settling in the United States and releasing his first Photomaton photo booth in 1925, located on Broadway near Times Square in New York City.

It was so successful that in just three years later in 1928, he sold the rights to the machine to Henry Morgenthau Sr. for $1,000,000.

And nearly a hundred years later it seemed that the smartphone more or less killed the photobooth.

But no, because within the past few years there is a revival of interest in using these booths.

I will keep on adding photos of any I come across. if you happen to know of a booth, let me know its location.